Getting good links for a web site is one of the most important steps a developer or webmaster can take. Directories and local search engines are two of the most important resources for acquiring good links. A handy listing is available on this site under the caption “Sites Related to Links“.
Client testimonials are one of the best ways to evaluate a service offering. I am happy to have had clients who have been willing to give me good testimonials over the years, and offer some of their comments on my web site for your consideration. Here are some of the things they have said:
“You showed us how to have the website we want and one in which we can make the changes on our own time table with no costs involved.”
“The phone is ringing and we are busier than ever. “
“We have more than made back our investment in new, high-quality paying clients.”
“We’ve had 100 guys come in here to talk about our web site, but no one gave us the kind of useful information you did.”
“This is the kind of follow-through and communication I thought only happened in dreams.”
“Thanks for trying to help us with all our computer problems. I finally feel we have someone in our corner.”
“Your involvement in our project saved us $150,000!”
“I would never have gotten it done by myself!”
To read more detail in their comments, go to my web page showing some client benefits.
Many times I have spoken about the dangers of hiring a web designer who is not oriented toward web optimization. Here is an article on web site design that does an excellent job of describing the problems that are created when you engage the wrong person to create your new site. Marketing firms and graphic designers might be very good at what they are familiar with, but web design is a different field, and many people try to use what they know from other fields without updating their understanding of the differences that are important in a different medium
Good web site design incorporates many features that only people with the right experience bring to the job. To be fair, some marketing firms or graphic designers have that experience, but, in my experience, they are few and far between! When you get the wrong person or team on the job, they will make choices that make sense in a different environment, but can cause serious problems on a web site. Those problems can range from costing you a lot more money to fix, up to and including making your site non-functional from a marketing perspective. To be specific, a good marketing web site is intended to attract traffic from the Internet, and if it doesn’t do that effectively, it is failing in its principal function!
I won’t go into the specifics any further, because Kristine does it so well in her piece, but keep the message in mind. I don’t know how many times I have had people tell me that everyone who sees their new web site loves it, and I look at it and see immediately that it will never produce any traffic from the web for their business! If what you really want is a site you can send people to because it is beautiful, that is all well and good, but most businesses are not really investing in a site for that purpose. most really intend that the site will produce a return on their investment for them by bringing in new business leads.
I just reviewed a one hour video featuring Matt Cutts (of Google) that gives a really good short course in search engine optimization. It is posted on Matt Cutts blog. Matt and his team go over all the basics of optimization in this session. It is a great overview, and points out a few tools that can be of great value to webmasters. Most everything he mentions in this session has been covered in our clinic, but I was not aware until he pointed it out, that Webmaster Tools will check your site for the existence of malware! Something like that can be really important to know if you think you are having a problem. This is a video that is worth an hour of your time if you want to make your web site perform better in the search engines!
This information was brought to my attention by Don Parsons, who has been associated with our clinic for many years and has taught several sessions for us. Thanks, Don!
In our last Internet marketing clinic session, a question came up about site maps.
There are two kinds of site maps, and they are both important tools to achieve better rankings for your site. One is a sitemap constructed as a page on your site. This is visible to the site users, and is a convenience for them, as well as a good tool for helping search engines to find the pages on your site. Because is is for site users, it should reflect some logical order to browsing your site.
When building it, you need to think about who is using your site and what they might be interested in seeing. You want to make it easy for them to find the information they are interested in. Because it is for readers, it may not include a link to every page on your site. That could become overwhelming for users and defeat an important purpose of the page. At the least, it should include a direct link to every major page on your site.
The second kind of sitemap is specifically for search engines, and the rules for it are different. It will definitely include a link to every page on your site, no matter how big your site is. For sites over 50,000 pages, this map has to be handled differently, but most sites for small businesses need not be concerned with this issue. A definition of sitemaps and good discussion of them is available on Wikipedia.
My class notes for the evening provide more information and a link to some software for creating a sitemap for your site.
This protocol for creating and using sitemaps goes back to 2006 and has been adopted by the top major search engines, so it provides excellent coverage and should not be overlooked by any webmaster! One important point to keep in mind is that you should set up a pointer to your sitemap in your “robots.txt” file, which all search engines look at. The sitemap won’t help you if the search engines don’t find it!
I have often commented in our clinic that big brands on big sites that have big budgets don’t really rank well in search engines. I just came across a long post that takes apart several sites to illustrate the point in considerable detail.
This post analyzes several big corporate sites and demonstrates pretty clearly that they just don’t do SEO very well! From my point of view, this is great news! What this means is that people who understand how to do their SEO properly, and who are willing to put the effort into doing it, can achieve great performance on search engines without having to spend a lot of money.
Since my clinic is oriented toward small businesses, and small businesses typically don’t have a lot of money (otherwise, they would be “big businesses”, yes?), this is really good news!
As I said, the article is a little long, and may seem, to some readers, technical, but it is worth reading to get a better understanding of what you are up against when working on your web site.
In a new blog posting, Google has just announced that they are now using site speed in their ranking algorithm.
In our clinic, we have always taught that the speed with which your page loads is an important factor in achieving a high performing web site. This announcement from Google makes it official!
In their article, they also provide links to tools to evaluate the speed of your web site. These certainly belong in your “webmaster toolkit”.
One tool, in particular, I found very interesting. The webpagetest gave me a detailed readout of the time it takes to load various components on my main clinic page. It not only breaks down the file size, but reports the time for the initial connection to the component, the time to first result, and the time to complete the download. As a result of this one examination of a single page on my site, I will institute new practices for building my pages, and will make several modifications to the page I tested.
In this specific case, I will remove the map providing directions to the classes, and will make that into a link to another page where the map and the link to Google Maps will appear. I can easily foresee how important this kind of testing can be to showing my clients how important it can be to revise how they build some of their more complicated pages on their sites!
Google also emphasizes another of the points that we harp on in the clinic, which is that the most important factor in high ranking is good, relevant content! Join us in our free Internet Marketing class to stay up to date with the latest developments in effective marketing over the web.